Two small
rock samples ? one from the top of our world and the second returned
from another ? are ready to launch to the International Space Station
(ISS) as a symbol of NASA's continuing mission to explore.

The space-bound stones ?
a fragment of Mount Everest's summit and four flecks from the moon ? were
presented Wednesday to George Zamka, the commander of NASA's next
space shuttle mission, by the first astronaut to scale the Earth's highest
mountain, Scott Parazynski.

"These
rocks have already done more than a human being could do in
a lifetime," said Zamka during the ceremony held at Space
Center Houston, the public visitor center for NASA's Johnson Space Center in Texas. "For four billion years they were on the moon,
undisturbed. They went through an ascent on a spaceship traveling to
Earth and then Scott took them to the limits of human endurance by
climbing up with them on Mount Everest. So they already have a
tremendous history. They're about to get a mileage upgrade."

"When
they go on the space station," he continued, "they are going
to travel at 17,500 miles an hour for a number of years. They are going
to have a tremendous trip."

Parazynski personally
retrieved the Everest rock
when he reached the 29,000-foot mountain's peak on May 20, 2009 while
carrying the four fragments of the moon collected by Neil Armstrong
and Buzz Aldrin during the first U.S. lunar landing mission 40 years
earlier.

"These
little samples were collected literally worlds apart," Parazynski
told collectSPACE.com. "But there are other worlds for us to go
explore, and [the space station crews] are going to be a part of it."

Zamka, who
with his STS-130 crewmates are scheduled to launch to the ISS onboard
space shuttle Endeavour on Feb. 7, will install the rock samples inside
the Cupola, a window-studded viewing port attached to the new module they
are adding to the outpost. Named "Tranquility" for the Apollo 11
site where the lunar crumbs were retrieved, the module will house the station's
life support systems.

Returns
and repeats

This isn't
the first time that fragments of Everest and the Moon have flown to the
space station, though it is the first mission on which they
have flown together.

NASA secretly
stowed a 21-gram lunar rock, also
brought back to Earth by the Apollo 11 crew, aboard a March 2009 shuttle
Discovery mission as part of its 40th anniversary celebration for the
first lunar landing. After floating aboard the orbiting outpost for a few
months, during which time it starred in a downlinked video from the ISS,
the moon rock was brought back to Earth but not before being scheduled for
another flight.

NASA
pledged to fly the rock back to the Moon on its first mission to
return humans to the lunar surface, a symbolic gesture that hearkened
back to 1972 and the Apollo 16 mission that delivered an Apollo
12-collected rock back to the Moon as part of a science experiment.

The moon
rocks that Parazynski toted up Everest and are next to fly with STS-130 --
four small chips that together weigh just 0.05 grams -- were originally
encased in acrylic for another symbolic mission: a goodwill
gift. By order of then-President Richard Nixon, approximately 250
similar button displays were created in late 1969 to be distributed to the
U.S. possessions and states as well as 135 foreign nations. The
now station-bound set was left over from that original allocation.

It was
another nation, Canada, which brought the first piece of Everest to the
space station. In Sept. 2006, STS-115 mission specialist and Canadian
Space Agency astronaut Steven MacLean flew a pebble from 'the top of
the world' that had been retrieved by Canadian mountaineer Bernard Voyer
in May 1999.

MacLean,
who in 2008 became president of the Canadian Space Agency, returned the Everest
rock to Voyer in April 2007.

At least
one other piece of the peak has flown to space. A rock collected in 1963
during the first ascent of the West Ridge of Mount Everest flew with
the personal items of mission specialist and medical doctor James Bagian
on the 1991 STS-40 Columbia mission.

Parazynski,
who like Bagian has a medical degree, gave NASA a rock he collected on
his second attempt at Mount Everest. His first climb a year earlier
in 2008 ended early due to his suffering a back injury.

Honoring
past, present and future explorers

The
NASA-prepared plaque to which both the moon rocks and Mount Everest rock
were attached for their flight to space includes an inscription dedicating
their journey with Parazynski to "honor explorers and heroes Neil
Armstrong and Sir Edmund Hillary," the first men respectively
to walk on the Moon and summit Everest.

Continue reading
at collectSPACE.com about the rocks' mission to challenge space explorers
and to see more photos from the handover ceremony.